


In the Face of All That's Known

by wtfmulder



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Angst, F/M, Horror, Surrealism, casefile
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-01
Updated: 2017-04-11
Packaged: 2018-10-13 13:28:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 18,998
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10514700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wtfmulder/pseuds/wtfmulder
Summary: After years of being gaslit by the universe at large, Scully seeks to overcome an overwhelming despondency (and Mulder’s attempts to crawl into her brain) by solving the mystery of the Town That Didn’t Know Anything. Without Mulder. Set post-Amor Fati.





	1. Chapter 1

His head felt heavy in her lap. Dead weight, a crate of oranges, ten large textbooks neatly stacked from her thighs to the tip of her nose. Heavy, damp and feverish as she stroked his hair, mindful of the bandages that capped it.

The tape recorder on the coffee blinked spider-like in the dark and waited patiently in apology for the restlessness of its owner. It listened because she didn’t want to, not really. But in dreamy monologue he referred to it, a cold, black thing, as you, I couldn’t find you, then you were there, can you get me a glass of water. And then we. He said we a lot.

She turned it off when the pain meds kicked in and he began lolling about, lifting his fingers in the air to count them and fail, rolling his face into her belly and burrowing in like a sleepy lapdog.

“I spent a good amount of my life trying to get in other people’s heads,” he moaned into her shirt, talking to air. “But you find out there’s not a lot worth listening to.”  
  
“You’re not still hearing them,” she wondered uneasily. He bumped his head insistently against the fingers that stopped moving in his hair and she resumed petting him.   
  
“I am a little,” he admitted. “Bits and pieces filter in. The headaches are gone. I hear maybe a few voices at a time, and only when they’re right next to me.” His chuffed laughter into her bellybutton tickled and made her squirm. “It’s why I don’t let you take me to my PT appointments. You should’ve seen how disappointed _Brendon_ was that it would be me stretched out over that medicine ball.”

Her fingers had stopped again but now he was too tired to pout. The solid heat of him in her lap, the humid air of his sweltering apartment: how worthless it all was in calming her cold as lake water insides. It filled her suddenly like a downed ship. “It’ll stop soon,” she said, not bothering to mask the harshness of her voice. Why even bother? “Dr. Farrah said your brain activity is steadily decreasing to a normal rate. You’ll be cleared for desk duty at the start of next week.”

He pulled his head back and stared at her. Topsoil brown in the pulsing light of the fish tank, they bored into her, a psychic lobotomy, and she felt him inside her playing clumsy archeologist.

His voice went louder than it had in weeks, intrusive and unaware like the rest of him, his gangly limbs and too big nose and tendencies to never shut up. “Not yet. I’m not ready yet.”

She looked at him hard. I know a little bit about being inside a person’s head, she thought at him. Your brain was petal pink and we had to peel your scalp like an apple. He smiled at her and touched her ear.

“I know you’re not ready to talk about it,” he said, tugging gently on the lobe.

No wonder he’d been acting this way, Scully would later think in the safety of her own home. Her brain was also petal pink and at times too soft. If Mulder held it in his hands it would spill out and cuddle his shoes. But this was much more invasive than that, him squinting at her like fading newsprint.

“We have to eventually,” he continued. “It’s everything.”

“If you know what I’m going to say,” she whispered, locking her jaw under his steady touch. “Why don’t you just say it for me.”

Bringing his voice down to her level didn’t soften her. It was patronizing, in light of his major upper-hand. But if he noticed her lack of faith he didn’t comment on it. “It would scare anyone, Scully. It scares me too. But it’s everything.”  
  
“We’ll get to that when we finish with you.” It wasn’t a lie if she believed she’d get over herself in time. And she did. So he left it at that, and she moved him aside to grab the tape-recorder and turn it back on. If he was sound enough to plunder the village of her thought processes and take hostage all the women and children, he could help her get some damn work done.

Oh, Dana. What were you thinking?

“It feels like another life, Scully. It went by so fast. I knew something was off because one minute I’d be having lunch with Samantha and my nephews and nieces and the next Diana would be pregnant. And it kept happening like that. But it was so _vivid_.” He looked at her sharply. She didn’t contemplate the possible hedonistic pleasure of shoving him onto the floor and caving in his new soft-spots. “How can they do that? How can they make it so real?”  
  
“Well, you’re the psychologist,” she said. “You know more about memory implantation than I do.”

“That’s the thing. Was it memory implantation? I feel like a little bit of it was. It was perfect.” He shook his head and the motion pulled her blouse out of her pants a little. “Too perfect. I couldn’t dream of it all by myself. Diana said something weird to me, which is what’s got me so confused.”

Scully had her entire existence to thank for her ability to stop inappropriate thoughts from clouding her judgment. Maybe Mulder didn’t count on that. She would be in her car and hauling ass down the beltway before things like _Perfect and I wasn’t even there_ took up residence in her petal pink head.

But she needn’t have worried, as Mulder seemingly forgot to invite her to the latest conversation. “She told me ‘ _now we can be together._ ’ That makes it seem… But other things. Deep Throat was there. How could they have known how much I… or the apricots. I never even…”   
  
“I don’t follow, Mulder.”

“I just don’t know what’s all been done to me.” He wiped a hand over his dry mouth and sighed. “I don’t know if they hypothesized a life for me based off… watching me, or studying me, and put it all in my head, or messed with my subconscious to cherry-pick little factoids about my desires to create that dream and make it real. I feel invaded. While they were taking something out of me, they were putting something in. I just want to remember it all and know what I’m dealing with.” With no hint of irony, displaying his usual lack of self-awareness, he told her; “I feel like I’m sharing my brain.”

Nothing in the world could stop the thoughts that came to her then, and genuine fright filtered through his apologetic glance.

“We’ll figure it all out,” she replied coolly, ignoring the unsettling reality of his hand stroking placatingly down her side. “Who knows. Maybe we missed the little VCR they planted behind the ocular nerve.”   
  
“Front row seats,” he grinned.

She left and he had tried to keep her there. Told her she was warm. And soft. Told her it was the drugs and snuggled his big nose between her thighs because he knew she wouldn’t slap an invalid. But really, she knew what it was – how easy it must be to toy with someone when you knew all of their feelings, while they understood none of your own; except, of course, that you had children with a dead woman and let the world burn to host board-game nights with the devil.

She knew it wasn’t fair for her to think that. But that’s why she had to go home.

***

She snapped at Arthur Dales when he called the office the next morning, and he snapped right back at her. She had been so sure it was Mulder. He wouldn’t stop calling her with his wheedling and his overwhelming Need To Know: if she was handling his precious workload with care, if she was ready to talk about everything in the known universe possibly being a lie, and above all, What Are You Thinking Scully (since he couldn’t be there to steal that information for himself).

The last time he called she delivered the deathblow: she wouldn’t be coming over that night. No, Mulder, we have three months worth of reimbursement requests to fill out. I still have to start the transcriptions for the four hours of taping we’ve already conducted. No, tomorrow I promised my mother we’d have dinner. His sulking air was palpable and filled her lungs even while over the phone. Bring it over here, he begged her. The work. Leave the office. The drugs they had him on now weren’t that strong, so she chalked it up to the temporary insanity brought on by too many people playing cards with your central nervous system.

But in fairness to him, work was a problem. She hadn’t been devoting the time it deserved. Where would they even start? Approaching the cabinet had a strange effect on her throat, namely that it would drop to her stomach. Maybe twenty times that day she wondered how they had ever possibly hoped they could find answers, and how could those answers be here, in an isolated shrine to a Truth constructed by lies. How could they be here and not in everything else. In nothing else. If Mulder stopped pushing, she could choose not to believe and get back to harping about evidence and God and the improbability of Big Foot crashing the annual Girl Scout camping trip.

Mindfulness, her therapist had told her once, the dialectical method. Very reluctantly and all too easily it became Scully’s way of life. She stood opposite from him in all things to meet him soundly in the middle. A thousand year old dance, the prototype of modern human discourse, there is no you without me and no me without you. Except there was, in one universe, maybe in a billion. And I don’t know if I can stand opposite of you for much longer, when there is only room for myself here in the Deep, Dark Middle.

But Arthur Dales stood to greet her there, rolling his eyes from the treacherous divide. For he asserted the validity of something Scully knew to be impossible and demanded, quite rudely, for her to prove him wrong.  
  


***

“Is that Agent Scully?” A much friendlier tone than the one he used to say _You want me to shut the hell up? Why don’t you shut the hell up? Is this what they’re paying you Feds for?_  “It’s so good to hear from you! Mulder told me all about your little ‘shroom trip. Good on you, using your science to solve the mystery. You are a sharp little cookie.”  
  
Yes I am, she thought, eyes twitching at the flush creeping up her neck. Something about a drunk older man reduced her to this sometimes. Add Arthur Dales’ predilection for delusional behavior and her general fondness for lunacy…

“I’ve been trying to reach Mulder for over a month,” Dales slurred reproachfully. Go figure; she could always count on Mulder to partake in her neuroses. It was understood that if his man asked Mulder to put his nose in the corner and count to thirty, he’d do it. The last thing he needed was another father figure, but at least Dales had never held him at gunpoint or kidnapped his sister.

“He’s been sick, sir,” she offered.

“You can’t let being sick stop you from catching a real life Skunk Ape,” he sniffed. “But I’ve got something much more important, now, something very close to my own heart. It demands immediate attention and his lollygagging could very well be costing civilians their lives and memories. All at the hands of our precious military.”

“Could it wait a few weeks? He’s on desk duty until January.”  
  
“Are you on desk duty, Agent Scully?”  
  
Agent Scully was not on desk duty. She hesitantly told him so.

“That’s what I thought. And I don’t think there’s a better qualified person on this planet to handle this. Something’s going on here, Agent. Something is very wrong.”

She turned on the speakerphone and leaned back in the office chair, crossing her heels on the cluttered desk. If anything, Dales was always good for a riveting story,

“It all started with my dear friend, Marcus Haze,” he began in his cinematic draw. “Good guy. Very quiet. Served in the Korean War and was generally regarded as a war hero by any and all who knew him.

“He moved into the park just a year after I arrived and it was as if I had found a kindred spirit in him. He was as big a seeker of life’s most insane, most miraculous dealings as I’d ever been, and he also grilled up a mean steak. We became fast friends. On Thursday nights, we’d fire up the old CB and keep going until we hit the bottom of the bottle. His handle was _Bo Duke_. Big kidder, that one. Mostly we just liked getting information on all the speed traps, but we liked listening in on boaters, too. You don’t have to be in the navy to act like a real sailor, I’ll tell you that.

“But there was a sadness to Marcus, too. A tragedy that could only be born of a series of mistakes for which no amount of time, nor excuses, could remedy. He oozed guilt like I’d never seen it. He’d lapse into these intense, foreboding silences, and I never quite knew what to do when he fell into these moods. Sometimes I’d leave his house, and it was as if he never knew I’d gone. And he’d never mention it the next day. I figured it had something to do with his service.”

Scully’s father had talked a little of men who came back from war, scarred more deeply than any bullet could ever reach. But Ahab assured his children, especially his boys, that proper men, proper soldiers, would return to their homes and know beyond measure that what they had done was right. Of course, this had been before PTSD was officially added to the DSM. She listened on.

“It got worse, after a time. He wouldn’t leave his trailer. Wouldn’t answer his phone. I’d go to his house, knock myself raw and wait for him to open up. The trash piled up behind him so bad I could see it and smell it through the crack in the door, and then he’d slam it in my face before I got a word in. It was a terrible thing to see.

“Now Agent Scully, I only have so many friends left. When I moved to Florida, I left everything behind. I had to. I know some people here, I play a few poker games. I even saw a film at the theater the other day, although the volume was so damn loud I had to leave early. What I’m saying is I don’t get out much. And that there are very few people on this planet who have truly, truly touched me. And Marcus was one of them. I wasn’t going to leave him to rot, not like he wanted me to.

“So I contacted his VA representative, who told me of local support groups in the area. I let her know just how bad he’d gotten and she informed me they’d send over a counselor to talk him through some stuff and get him connected to resources that would help him out.

“Now I was very skeptical of this. I was just so sure they’d Baker Act him and let him get caught up in the system. But Agent Scully, the change was dramatic. They sent someone over. I didn’t see it happen, but he came over the day after and let me know. He couldn’t stop thanking me. And things went back to normal.

“A week later, he came ‘round my place and told me there was somewhere he was going to and that he probably wouldn’t be back. Dropped off his best twelve-year-old Lagavulin, said he wouldn’t need it anymore.

“I couldn’t talk him out of it. He took off. I was sad that I’d lost a companion but I knew he needed his chance to find that last bit of happiness he could ring from the rag this close to the end of his life. I still need to find mine.

“He came back after a month. And that lightness to him, the one that’d been so blindingly apparent the time I had last seen him: it was all totally gone. He got deeper into his mood than ever. He shot himself, Agent Scully. Shot himself right in the head.”

The basement lapsed into complete silence with Dales’ solemn revelation. There was something about a story with a hopeful climax and a dreadful resolution that knocked the wind out of your sail. There could never be a proper response to an event like that, and Scully found herself at a loss for words.

“I am so sorry, Mr. Dales,” she decided to say. It didn’t come out trite and awkward, not with how much she obviously meant it. “You believe that the military had something to do with it?”

“I couldn’t let it go, Agent Scully,” Dales whispered sadly. “I found out where he flew off to when I saw him last. And something just isn’t right.”


	2. Chapter 2

It was grounding and in that lied the appeal. Her gut reaction, the pistol-drawing fury of her analytical mind: they were solid and they were hers. Dales was wrong. She knew it, she knew she knew it because you couldn’t pick and choose what memories to suck out of a human being. Or put into a human being, for that matter. They weren’t polaroids, or little notes written in pink and gray and bright, bright red, they were electrical impulses that moved from gyri to sulci like voltage through a network of hotwires. Mulder had that dream because of what was already stored in his morbid little computer, and Marcus Haze killed himself because his clinical depression and PTSD pushed him toward alcoholism and a few decades worth of unchecked panic attacks. He suffered alone and died alone because Uncle Sam wanted it that way. But not in the way Dales hypothesized.

And really, there was a danger in staying in D.C. that threatened to destroy her as soon as she ran out of excuses. This way she could wait Mulder out. A weakened immune system needed quarantine and incubation, and she supposed her mind was the same. Mulder wanted to pull and prod and yank it out of her with his syringe-like super powers, wanted to hold it in his hands and bring it back to life to use as he saw fit. But it didn’t work that way. It never would.

It would be a regular vacation, in the books and in her head. It would take what, a day? To get in and out of a little Florida island with tangible evidence that the government wasn’t stealing our memories and making us pod people. A day and she’d be walking chilly beaches and eating oysters straight from the source.

She got the paperwork ready. With Skinner’s fear of looking her in the eyes and Kersh salivating at any chance to further delay proceedings of the X-Files, she expected the Bureau to kiss her feet and prostrate itself in relief at her request to take some time off. How long had her mom been telling her to go on  vacation? Take some time off, Dana, you can’t live like this forever. I can’t live like this forever, mom. I can’t live like this for five more minutes.

Before Arthur Dales hung up the phone, Scully told him: Don’t tell Mulder. And Dales didn’t even question it. Just said, no swimming this time of year. Hiking will be nice, though. Bring some gear.

She told herself: Don’t tell Mulder. It was a difficult feat, to stop your thoughts from being your own.  
  
But she did it.

He called her for the final time that day and she steeled herself for what she was about to do.

“Scully,” she said, for appearances.

“Scully, it’s me,” Mulder replied. There was a smile in his voice that made the guilt come early, before she had even really formulated a plan. “I’m glad I caught you before you head home. Come over. We don’t have to – tape, you know. Work.” He laughed nervously, a new trait of his that proved wholly surreal to Scully. “I’m just a – just a little lonely here without the hopes, dreams and agonies of five billion people streaming in my head.”

“I will,” she promised, ignoring the shock of him asking her to do something outside of work. There had been baseball but that was a million years ago and they acted like it never happened. “I have something I need you to sign.” Regretting the touch of coldness in her voice (he just wants to read my _fucking mind_ ), she added: “And I’ll bring pizza.”

***

They didn’t eat the pizza. She left it with him in some kind of depressing transaction, folding the vacation request and slipping it into her briefcase on her way out. He still had his head in his hands by the time she slammed the door behind her.

He almost didn’t sign it. Told her he wouldn’t. In all her life, Dana Scully had never felt so righteously angry. The last time she had felt anything _approaching_ this, she ended up with a tattoo on her back and got up close and personal with a raging furnace. That tattoo burned her now as she stomped down the hallway and punched the right button on the elevator, all the while hissing in her head: how dare he? How dare he? How fucking dare he? Thought it about him, around him, at him. Hoped it would whip through the air and smack him in the mouth.

Crashing his pity-party, she completely forgot to think about what she was trying to hide from him. She should be grateful.

The ride home was a blur. Purchasing her airline ticket was a blur. Packing her bags was a blur. She would leave on Sunday but she wanted to be prepared in case Mulder pulled any of his stupid bullshit tricks to get her to stay, like setting her apartment on fire to keep her from leaving or, or, pulling rank on her like he had tried to do an hour ago, shirtless and fuzzy-haired on his leather couch. She would look Skinner straight in the eye tomorrow and make it known, nothing would stop her from going on this trip. She would wear all black. She would gel her hair. She would get real close to him and Make. It. Known. Her face would say it all, and he would have visions of his tombstone dancing in his eyes by the time she left his office.

To fuel her anger, she argued with the Mulder in her head about the details of the case. This Mulder was ten times more ridiculous than the Mulder she forcibly interacted with on a daily basis (and at appropriate times, more tactile), and the Scully in her head kicked his ass, hard, mostly in an intellectual way but veering towards physical near the end. He was a cowering mess on the floor by the time she was done with him.

When she finished feeling mean there was only practicality. She sat on her couch and went over all the details she’d written down when Dales described the situation to her over the phone.

It was an island Marcus Haze had run off to, but not an island in the typical sense. A stretch of land situated in the split of St. John’s River, a forgotten relic of unincorporated Seminole County. Scully looked it up online and found absolutely nothing. She reminded herself to check out the records section at the Hoover building to see if anything stood out there.

But she imagined she would find nothing, simply because there was nothing to find. If what Dales said was true – the island was overrun by people who had absolutely no idea who they were or how they got there – her running theory that it was home to an assisted living community for people with severe dementia stood up to reason. What Marcus Haze had been doing there was the question she decided to answer, as a courtesy to Arthur Dales and, after recent developments, to herself. She really did need this vacation.

There was an essential flaw to what Dales proposed – that Haze’s little vacation had anything to do with his following suicide. The old ‘correlation does not equal causation’ adage played in her mind. From what she knew of Haze, going off of Dales’ description, the man was deeply troubled, deeply guilty, and decided to end his life after a futile attempt to push through. It was devastating. Unthinkable, that a man who gave so much to his country could not get the help he needed at the right time. By the time it had been available to him, it was too late.

It certainly seemed fitting, however, that a man who’d been unceasingly tortured by his past would be drawn to a place where nobody seemed to remember it. Scully could admit that. It was  possible Haze got the same impression that Dales had upon arriving on the island and decided to take his chances. What he thought would happen she couldn’t be sure. Amnesia wasn’t catching. Dementia wasn’t catching. What had Haze been doing there? And how did he ever find out about it?

Her sleep that night was fitful and fleeting. She dreamt of a parted river, red like her African sea.

Friday and Saturday rolled together smoothly with radio silence from Mulder, and getting on her plane was almost absurdly easy considering she expected to be fought every step of the way. The morning she delivered her request to Skinner’s office she checked and double-checked her wallet for her badge, drove so carefully on the beltway she arrived late, and flirted a little with his secretary to ensure easy access to his office. If Mulder got to Skinner, there’d been no sign of it. He accepted her request without hesitance and Kersh did the same. The ease of it all made her more nervous. Who was this person she’d become, who couldn’t accept a blessing as it revealed itself to her?

***

Arthur Dales greeted her at the Orlando International Airport, having shed the seersucker robe in favor of a simple cotton button-down and finely pressed khakis. She’d been so sure he didn’t own real clothing or ever left the trailer park. It was  jarring to see him bright-eyed and sober, and something like fondness for him grew against her better judgment.

“I’d like to take you to the river,” he told her, helping her load her bags into his trunk. “But I’m not going into town. It gives me the heebeejeebies.”

“What happened to being a ‘seeker of life’s insane, most miraculous dealings’?” she teased gently. His smile was regretful and presented only for her benefit.

“Life has a way of sucking that out of you, Agent Scully,” he said  while starting the car. His eyes on the road were stern and determined. “Do not _ever_ let that happen to you.”

He drove like an old person and they were honked at more than once on the hour-long drive to Sanford. He cussed them out under his breath, apologized to the lady for his foul language, and went on to do it some more.

“This’ll be a good case for you, Agent Scully,” he said thoughtfully. “It’s gonna mess with your head. Last time I met you, you were so sure I was full of it.” He quickly glanced at her innocent face and laughed. “You did. And I was right.”   
  
“Mr. Dales, if I may, there were certain details to your story that – “  
  


“It doesn’t matter, though. This is more of the same. You’re going to have to see it to believe it, and that’s more than fair. But Agent Scully – and this is imperative – you have to believe it when you see it. There are people who are counting on you.”

It’s a call-out he didn’t mean to make, but it hit her hard all the same. The rest of the car-ride continued in comfortable silence as the billboards faded away and they slipped through college towns, tourist traps and run-down communities. She’d been north of Florida with Mulder and she’d been south. It’s fitting that she found herself alone at its center.

They pulled into a lovely little dockside town, gray skied and intelligent in its Spanish architecture and vastly multicultural array of bars and restaurants. A humming music played in the square, something contemporary, probably, but respected, and swaddled people walked their dogs and sipped coffee under sturdy table umbrellas.   
  
“It’s not that cold,” Scully frowned at her light suede jacket. They had to cross the square to enter the dock. Dales barked out a laugh.  
  
“Their cold and our cold are entirely different,” he said good-naturedly. “You wouldn’t last a day in the Florida sun.”

The ex-Fibbie paid a man to take her to the island, a spotty teenager with six earrings and an all black ensemble. She wondered how they met, how Dales met anyone. How anyone met Dales. The kid looked at her unimpressed and motioned her to join him in the little canoe.

“This is is about as far as I go,” Dales told her, scanning the river with squinted eyes. “There’s nothing for me there. Nothing for anyone, really.”

From her research Scully knew there were supposed to be manatees in this river. She looked around and saw nothing in the choppy water. She had looked forward to seeing them. Manatees were once confused for mermaids. Alone for years, stranded on boats and raving mad with syphilis, losing their teeth and chomping on limes, she could see it clearly, how one might look at something for a long time and learn to love it as something else.

“I’ll leave you to it then,” Dales nodded his head sharply. He patted the end of the canoe and lifted off of his knees. “You know where to call me. You’re probably gonna need to do some testing, fingerprinting, blood-work and all of that - you brought your gear?”  
  
“Of course,” she said, slightly annoyed to be checked on.

“Well you can courier it on down to me. I’ve got my contacts that’ll do a better job than the Feds could.”

***

In languid strokes, the boy steered them all the way over to the island and avoided conversation by shoving headphones over his ears and jamming out to his discman. It was loud enough that Scully could hear screaming, the tachycardiac rhythm of a double bass pounding at his temple. Charlie Scully, the scrawny goth boy with spiked red hair and black lipstick he stole from Melissa. The boy she used to protect in school hallways, side by side with brother Bill. Guess who bullies had been more afraid of.

The captain rolled his eyes at her little smile. She let it turn into a grimace and turned her face to the shore ahead. Deep green water and a mass of furled trees, sturdy palms poking out like broken thumbs. Everything smelled like salt and fish.

Parked on shore, he went to help her with her bags with a politeness that startled her a little. He couldn’t hear her over the music, so she firmly tapped him on the shoulder to grab his attention.   
  
“What do you want?” he said, boorishly throwing her suitcase on the wooden dock.  
  
Screw you too, asshole. She mostly ignored it. “Have you been here before?”

His face fell, drooping around his ruddy piercings like melted cheese. She hadn’t noticed how tightly he’d been holding himself together. “Yeah. I was here this morning.”

Something about his answer didn’t sit right with her. “Why do you come here?” She asked, refusing the urge to cup his forehead. He looked like he wanted to fall down.

“I don’t come here,” he said. “I go over there.”   
  
And he pointed to the dock they had just departed from.

***  
  
Trying to get any more information out of him would’ve been easier if he were a cryptozoological creature. Where are your parents? He looked at her like she was crazy to mention parents, and not even in that teenage angst way. Just legitimately crazy. Like she’d been babbling about… aliens, or river monsters. Do you work on the island? I guess. Since when? I guess since always.

It was easy for her to dismiss him as another unruly post-pubescent, so she did. She remembered the mouth on Charlie, the mouth on herself at times. Dana, can you walk to the commissary and pick up some milk? I don’t know, can I? The stinging of her cheek hadn’t been worth it. But Melissa begged to differ. She had always thought it was worth it.

The river island was much smaller than she had anticipated, cookie-cutter buildings hidden under jewel green leaves and bouncing Spanish moss. All the driveways were empty, though there were roads – people with severe dementia didn’t typically drive cars. She winded down them, waiting to catch the first glimpse at life.

There, in a small diner – powder blue building, but the inside was painted dark red like a bad seventies movie set. People were there, normal looking people, and they chattered quietly or munched by themselves as she hauled her bags through the door. No one turned to look at her but the waitress, holding a dish by the register.   
  
“Hello,” the blonde said. Aging prettily, a textbook example of average health and a good moisturizing routine. The touch of gray looked lovely on her temples. Her lip color, a salmon pink, was skillfully applied and matched well with her salmon pink uniform.

“Hi, my name is Dana Scully,” she started, the beginnings of an awkward grin spreading on her face. Maybe she could figure out what it meant to be a person again.

“Do you want food?” interrupted the waitress. Scully killed her smile before it became real. Failed experiment. But she was hungry, hadn’t eaten since her hasty breakfast at the airport.

“Just some fruit and a fresh cup of coffee would be nice,” she said, climbing up on the barstool. The waitress frowned.  
  
“I have spaghetti with sauce and Shasta cola.”   
  
“Is that…” Scully paused, looking behind the woman into the kitchen. She couldn’t hear the customary noise of pans clattering, water running. Bubbling oil, the pull of a sharp knife on a wooden cutting board. No sound at all. And she couldn’t see anyone back there. “Is that all you have?”

“And salt and pepper,” the waitress nodded. Without confirming with Scully that she was ready to order, the woman spun around and clicked into the kitchen. In several seconds she was plopping down a lukewarm mug filled with spaghetti and a flat can of Shasta cola. “Here you go.”  
  
“Is that Mug-O-Lunch?” Scully hadn’t seen that since the seventies when poverty had forced her to scarf it down at the dinner table. Plastic noodles, biohazard warning sauce. Yes. That was Mug-O-Lunch.  
  
“And Shasta cola,” the waitress said. The salt and pepper came next.


	3. Chapter 3

Scully ate the Mug-O-Lunch without gagging and tried to get some information out from the waitress, who appeared increasingly annoyed with every word that came from her mouth.   
“I have customers,” she finally hissed. Scully looked around, noting the diner had emptied out. They were alone. The sky had gone dark and everyone finished up their little mugs and went… somewhere, presumably home. She arched an eyebrow at the woman but understood the conversation to be over.

Dales had promised her an Inn, told her it was right by the water and that she’d never felt so completely unharassed. No kidding. The night manager, a pair of double-bridged glasses, handed her a key and told her to find a room.

“Which room?” she asked. He frowned at her and shook his head.

“How should I know?” 

Unsettled, Scully slipped her key into each lock before it finally unlocked the one at the very end. The room itself was… normal. Relatively. The crocheted pillows and chair cover were normal by most standards but definitely not her own. She prodded them with distaste. The shag carpet put her off a little, too. But the room was clean, the faucets worked and yet there was the distinct impression no one had set foot there in years.

Some of her best investigative work came to her in the shower. Under the piddling spray she washed her hair and considered the three Islanders she’d briefly met; The Sulking Boy, The Tired Waitress, The Clueless Manager. Academy training taught that there was always a profile to follow, always some kind of pattern. Humanity could be solvable as a standard equation. However, these people fell so quickly and believably into their roles Scully could admit it rubbed her the wrong way.

But Arthur Dales had adamantly argued this island was a victim of military-imposed memory loss. Nothing Scully saw or encountered led her to that conclusion. Memory loss manifested itself in different ways in different people, but to experience it to the degree he claimed would axiomatically result in severe anxiety or at the very least a little disorientation. She saw none of that here. General cluelessness, unease at her presence. But not one person seemed out of their element. They had places to be, roles to play, and they followed the pattern accordingly. It was similar to the way she approached her life. Off-putting and pathetic, frankly, but not an X-File.

The diner was weird, but easily explained. What restaurant didn’t occasionally run out of supplies? They were probably waiting on a shipment for stock that just hadn’t come in yet. As for the manager of Day Tripper Inn he could barely get her the key without stumbling over the mass of wine bottles decorating the floor. Poor service – but again, not an X-File.

She’d meet the others in the morning. In her search for the motel she spotted people walking into their homes, huddling in doorways and talking with their neighbors. A town square came to life only a block away and from her room she could hear the steady pulse of a bass drum, a string of delighted laughter. Not the sounds of a terrible conspiracy, but of life being lived and not by her. Tomorrow she would remedy that, right after her inevitable argument with Arthur Dales. She could drown the memories of his patriarchal disappointment with hard liquor and book her plane the next day.

Tonight she figured she should probably get some transcribing done. Mulder’s tapes clacked around in the bottom of her carryon and alerted her to their presence all day – and, rather unfortunately, of the man himself – and the faster they dealt with this, with Africa and dream babies and forgoing thirty-five years of intense religious indoctrination, the faster they could get back to them, whoever they were, whatever places they had to be and roles they had to play for the remainder of eternity.

She had her laptop open and her headphones in when her cell rang. Damn it. Damn it damn it damn it. It took her so long to get herself ready to start writing. She plucked her earbuds out hastily and fumbled to answer the call with a rage-trembling finger. “Scully,” she barked. 

“Why’d you take your cell phone?” Mulder asked pleasantly. Damn it. Damn it, I am going to kill him. 

“For emergencies,” she said slowly. “Which I am assuming is not the case here.”

“You didn’t give me the number to your room.”

“I didn’t want you to have it,” she pointed out. 

“Well that’s not nice.” He tinkered with something in the background and the bleed through was tinny and dramatic. “Shit!”

“What are you doing, Mulder?” she asked worriedly, in spite of herself. “You’re still recovering. No strenuous activity yet. Are you okay?”

“Dropped a fork into the garbage disposal,” he said, amusement decorating his tone. “I’ll tell my doctor all about it when she gets back, but I think I’m cleared for menial household labor.”

“I didn’t know you did chores,” she replied. Their banter was much easier to fall into when he wasn’t visibly salivating all over her limbic system.

“I thought I flicked on the light,” he admitted. “I’m trying to microwave some pizza rolls.”

The ensuing silence was uncomfortable but not tense. She wanted him to apologize and he didn’t. He wanted her to explain and she didn’t. Instead they listened to each other breathe and do the things they’d be doing if they were sitting side by side. He broke first, before either of them were really ready. 

“Whatever you’re feeling, whatever you’re thinking–”

“Is not owed to you, Mulder, or to anyone,” she interrupted. Her voice was not unkind.

 

“I know that, Scully, I do. But I’m here Scully.” His voice was beseeching, a party invitation he might as well beat her over the head with. “I’m here the whole way.”

“This is unlike you, Mulder,” Scully realized. Her eyebrows furrowed as she thought it over, his behavior the past few weeks, the cuddling and the coddling and the staying in bed just because she told him to and not getting himself into any trouble thing. “Are you okay?” Shame trickled in like algae coating placid waters. He was sick. She’d left him and he was still sick. Of course he was acting weird. Of course he was. She left him. 

“Scully, I am better than I’ve been my entire life,” he spoke vehemently, as if talking in capital letters and punctuation, signed and sealed and Certain. “Scully, I think I’m the happiest I’ve ever been. Give or take twelve years.”

So often they would get their wires crossed, only because one would refuse to ask the other to elaborate. This would be another one of those times. The call ended pleasantly, a white flag buried in the ground. Scully decided against transcribing. Her face hit the pillow with a little too much force. 

***

She put on a suit the next morning during an argument with herself on whether this was actually a vacation or a case. Neither, it’s absolute lunacy. Why am I here. She stepped into her most sensible heels and was body-slammed with dictionary-thick humidity the moment she opened the door.

Her hair curled out of its spray, water gathered on her upper lip. It was the beginning of December and her stockings slid wetly in her shoes as she clicked down the street and into the square. She was going to kill Arthur Dales. He hadn’t warned her about this at all.

The square possessed a small-town vibe she’d only ever read about and never seen in spite of all her travels. The drugstore on the corner, a singular bar. Granted it was more The Simpsons than Little House on the Prairie, but it was small, and it was bustling. Machinelike and purposeful, it gave her the sense of starring in some German “before the war” film.

The tallest building called to her from the end of the road: her crack in the case. Her Dementia Town theory would be proven there. The sign in front of it boasted “Medical Center” in giant, painted letters and although Scully immediately doubted the scientific legitimacy of such a place, she walked inside.

A young woman sat in the reception area, doe-eyed with beautiful brown hair that curled down to the small of her back. She smiled at Scully patiently.

“Are you a doctor?”

Scully took pause at that, eyeing the woman oddly. It was so seldom she had been asked that (she normally provided the information without prompting) that the whole of it didn’t appear all that weird at first, just the fact that it was asked of her. But then she realized that it was pretty strange for the receptionist to not know what doctors were in that day.

“Yes,” she answered anyway. It was not a lie. The receptionist beamed at her.

“That’s great!” She searched her empty desk for a moment, then shrugged her shoulders. “I’m pretty sure I’m not.”

“What do you mean by that?” Scully frowned. You couldn’t not know. Not after med school. You wore med school for the rest of your life. 

“Most of the doctors have tools,” she replied, as if it explained anything. “I didn’t have any when I checked this morning.”

“Did you think you were a doctor?” Scully cocked her head. “Before you realized you didn’t have any tools?”

“I didn’t think I was anything.” The sweetness of her face melted like sugar into caramel, and then it burned. Dark. But then she perked up again. “But I figured it out alright, it wasn’t that hard. How did you figure it out?”

Ignoring the question, Scully leaned over large desk separating them and searched for anything you might expect to find at a receptionist’s desk; folders, papers, business cards, staples… pens, post-it notes. But there was truly nothing there. Nothing anywhere in the room.

“What kind of Medical Center is this?” Scully asked warily. The paperwork was going to be exhausting. She was going to drown in it. If she reported this place it might include taking the stand, taking extra days off work. There’d be malpractice lawsuits. They’d have to find the patients… and if this was a clinic for the memory impaired that was going to be hard to do. 

“You’re the doctor,” the receptionist replied, looking at her as if she were stupid. “Go ask the other doctors.”

“There are other doctors here?” The receptionist narrowed her eyes. “You’re right. I’ll go find them.”

Scully got the feeling she was being played, like if she were to look over her shoulder as she left the waiting room The Receptionist would be laughing at her, waving byebye with her fingers wiggling in the air. So she did look over her shoulder, only to find her staring blankly at the wall.

Beyond the waiting room there was a hallway filled with examining rooms, and Scully looked into open doors to find little cabinets with sinks, adjustable hospital beds. Hand sanitizer dispensers littered them all. There were no posters or models or anything else doctors use to make appointments easier on a patient, but that wasn’t damning in itself. Just cold.

Only two of the doors were closed, and she cautiously opened one of them and peered inside. A man wearing an oxygen mask and a white coat leaned over a coughing woman and prepared to administer some kind of I.V. medicine.

“FBI!” Scully shouted, thrusting her badge in the door before she entered. The woman jumped and the “doctor” dropped his line on the ground. “What is going on here?”

“I’m sick,” the old woman spat, before breaking up into hacking coughs. The doctor glared at Scully.

“She’s sick,” was all he said.

Scully marched over to the I.V. pad and looked closely at the fluid inside. It was clear and runny. “What’s in here?”

“Saline,” the doctor replied tightly. “She’s dehydrated.” 

“And you’re a doctor?” Scully spun around to look him over. He still hadn’t taken off his oxygen mask and a stethoscope hung around his neck. “What’s your name? Where are her charts?”

“She’s sick,” he said again, and bent down to pick up the needle he dropped. He replaced it with a sterile one as Scully stood in frozen curiosity. He expertly found the vein he was looking for, and the woman tipped her head back and closed her eyes.

“I’m sick,” she rasped.

Scully slowly backed out of the room, clutching tightly onto her badge.

***

When something frightened her, her whole body would get hot. It always started with her face. The heat would sink in right under her ears and flow upwards to her forehead and bubble downward until she was sweating with it. And in the Florida heat it was almost unbearable.

Arthur Dales picked up immediately when she called him, and warned her not to tell anyone just yet. To not just call in the C.D.C. or the Florida Board of Medicine.

“If something’s really wrong,” he pleaded, “they’re all going to be in on it. They’re just going to sweep it under the rug.”

In a pattern she originally thought she had only reserved for Mulder, she argued the ethics of that suggestion quite valiantly. Then she gave up and went along with it. For now, she wouldn’t make any calls. But she was unnerved.

It was too hot. By the time she’d stumbled back into her room her cheeks were flushed with it and her clothes were sticking to her like it had just rained. She shucked them off and showered in the cool water for a good forty minutes until her bones began to ache and her bed called to her in manatee-siren song.

It was only around lunch time, but she didn’t want to take a nap anyway. With a fierceness a voice inside her head begged her to call Mulder. She hadn’t realized how good he had gotten at making her believe she was doing the right thing. She hadn’t realized how difficult it was now to convince herself of that. That’s probably not healthy, she thought sadly. But the best parts of them never really were.

***

It was that blurry line between vacation and case that made her pull on a UMD t-shirt and a modest pair of running shorts. She treaded that line in her beat up Nikes on a jog along the silent shore, kicking up dark sand and scaring white ibises into a screaming chorus. Was she really sweating that much or was the humidity clinging onto her?

She came to a panting stop in front of a decrepit pavilion. It overlooked the water in a hangdog way, reminding her of all those wooden playgrounds constructed in the thirties in an effort to create jobs and fleeting happiness.

A boy stood behind it, leaning up against a shelving unit for kayaks. He worried a lip piercing with his tongue and tried to flip the shock of blond hair out of his face without using his hands; it all looked quite silly, and Scully followed the urge to see him up close.

He was young, much younger than anyone she’d seen so far. In fact he might have been the only minor in town. He couldn’t have been a day over sixteen. He regarded her with pissy disdain.

“Boat?” He asked. He jerked his head at the kayaks. Scully rented a kayak.

“Do you rent these out every day?” she asked him as he helped her drag it into the water. 

“Probably,” he answered casually, pressing down on her shoulders like it had any chance of making it a better fit. Not really. Her legs barely brushed the plastic on top of them and she could spread out wider than what was safe. “I don’t think I’m supposed to be here.”

“Oh?” she said, curious. But he was pushing her out in the water and the river was taking her away. “Why do you say that?”

“Come see my band,” he told her. But he didn’t look like he really cared if she did.

She paddled past tall, wispy palm trees and ugly, red-faced ducks. She paddled into the woods and watched the turtles lounge sleepily on exposed deadwood. The bugs were noisy and the air was thick and hot and wetter than the water, but Scully dreaded it less now.

Her arms and neck blushed with the warnings of a bad sunburn and she was reminded of standing on an African shoreline, ugly and red-faced. And screaming.

The boy she rented the kayak from didn’t know how much he was supposed to charge her. He told her to just give him some money. 

“Where do you live?” she asked him, handing him a twenty. He shrugged.

“Come see my band.”

***

That night she ended her phone call with Mulder early to go figure out where this band was. Where are you Scully? he asked with fake nonchalance. I’m still your emergency contact, right? She didn’t tell him where she was, and he didn’t push it.

There was really only one place for a band hookup – the bar. Playerless instruments sat in the corner, looking listless and Ready To Go. 

A woman, the only woman in the bar, introduced herself as the town alcoholic. She was surrounded by empty shot glasses all smeared with her nude pink lipstick. Scully eyed her cautiously and sat down three seats away from her.

“Old fashioned, please,” Scully asked the bartender, keeping her eyes on the woman. The town alcoholic licked her lips and took a sip of her drink. The keep, a tall Asian man, some thirty years or older, nodded his head even as he frowned.

“I don’t think I know how to make that. Care for a glass of wine?”

“Uh,” Scully squirmed in her seat. “Yes. That’d be great. Your best white, please.”

He turned away and she watched him as if he were a movie she’d already seen. He surveyed all the bottles behind him and stroked his beardless chin.

“They’re all the same.” He whirled around to face her. “Red.”

“That’ll work, then.” And he poured her a glass. “How long have you been working here?”

He paused in the middle of refilling the other woman’s assortment of shot glasses with more wine. “Um.” The vein pulsing in his forehead told her he was trying, trying hard to remember. “I guess forever?”

“Everything’s forever,” the drunk woman laughed. Waifish and brown-eyed with a voice like rustling leaves. It was the most personality Scully had been exposed to all day. Involuntarily, she was captivated, leaning into the smaller woman’s space without realizing it. Men always seemed to like how small Scully was and she could now see the appeal.; she felt delightedly masculine, eyeing all the places the woman’s bones popped out. Sturdy and grounded. Glad she’d worn pants.

She was going through some conversation starters in her head when the door opened and a small crowd of people flooded in. She saw the Doctor, the Old Woman, the Waitress. The Motel Manager had already been at the bar. The Receptionist hung off the shoulder of the boy she saw before, not the kayak boy, but the boy who sailed her to the island. He brushed her off to sit behind the trapset and she pouted at him prettily.

Another boy, no piercings but heavily tattooed, came up and grabbed the guitar. The crowd disbursed slightly, into booths and onto stools and against the wall. Everyone ordered wine. Scully waited for the kayak boy, the blond, but he never came. The microphone stand stood untouched. The boys began to play.


	4. Chapter 4

The Alcoholic’s fingerprints, looping clumsily along her many shot glasses. A wine bottle from the Manager’s office; she’d seen him drink straight from source. Strands of hair she’d nabbed from the collar of the Waitress’ uniform, as the woman swayed dreamily in front of her to the tuneless musings of two talentless teenage boys. **  
**

Scully had dated a self-described punk in college; her first taste of rebellion out in the open. Quickly she’d understood defiance  was meant to be fermented. Some things just tasted better in the dark, and having her parents angry with her and threatening to pull her out of school had been decidedly less fun than her father’s unknowing hand resting affectionately on her shoulder.

But that punk had a 4.0 GPA and wore polos and and a sweater tied around his neck every time his parents dropped by for a visit. Years later she might have appreciated the duplicitous nature, might  have recognized traces of it in herself. Nineteen and pissy and crushing hard on Joe Strummer, she’d broken up with him when he told her he loved her and hooked up with the guitarist of his band.

He’d been the bassist.

Who needs a bassist? had been the favorite joke, the most obvious. Bassists never get laid. What do you call a person who hangs around a band? A bassist. She’d heard all the jokes, laughed at them, agreed with them under the careful strumming of her guitarist’s fingers.

But there, in the bar. Where was the bassist? The boys played against each other, two separate, discordant songs, untethered by the mellow notes of a bass guitar. How obvious it was, how absurdly mismatched. Like in everything else this town offered, she was hit with the knowledge that something was missing. Not just wrong, but missing.

The boy was gone, the blond one. She searched for him in the chattering crowd, waited for someone to grab the microphone and apologize for the inconvenience. We’re sorry, our singer and bassist is out sick. Stick around for the noise. No one did, and no one noticed when she left. She grabbed the shot glasses, the curled strand of hair. In the empty office at her motel she took a wine bottle with gloved hands and lobbed it into an evidence bag. Tomorrow she would call Arthur Dales. Tomorrow she’d continue looking for the boy.

***  
  
“You’re going to have to courier all that stuff to the Bureau,” Dales told her apologetically. “Pull in all your favors. I’m afraid I’ve just run out of mine.”   
  
Pinching the bridge of her nose and letting her head fall back on the headboard, Scully kept herself from sniping at him. “I’m sorry, Mr. Dales, but it doesn’t quite work like that. I can’t just use Bureau resources for personal excursions like this and expect they keep it off record.”  
  
“What? You want me to believe that crap? All the stuff Agent Mulder has you doing I’m sure they wouldn’t even bat an eye.”

“That’s not a habit that I’m trying to encourage.” But he was right. Shannon from NDIS owed her a few autopsies’ worth of no-questions-asked favors. All of those ‘get out of a lousy on-loan VICAP assignment’ free cards tumbled out of her pocket, and she mourned them greatly. “I thought the aim of me being here and not involving the CDC or the local government was to keep this investigation out of official hands.”   
  
“But you agree?” Dales seized on her slip, and Scully knew she was caught. “That this is worthy of an investigation? Enough to warrant DNA testing?”  
  
“It’s an odd town,” Scully answered carefully. “Every person I’ve encountered – so far, which _hasn’t been many_ – shows signs characteristic of some sort of memory disorder.  But Mr. Dales, there are many, many potential factors and all of my theories have nothing to do with the military. I still haven’t ruled out the possibility that this island serves as an assisted care facility for people suffering from long-term amnesia. Most certainly retrograde – these people seem to have no issues with procedural memory or difficulty retaining new information. Beyond that, there are medications, head injuries, thyroid gland issues, sexually transmitted diseases, sleep deprivation, and stress disorders to account for, and that’s nearly impossible for me to navigate alone with no resources.  I also would like you to consider that alcoholism is a major player here. Last night I watched the entire town drink until they experienced some loss of motor control. You told me about Marcus’s affinity for hard liquor.”   
  
“Marcus wasn’t an alcoholic,” Dales said. “That’s just me. I don’t drink with people who drink as much or more than I do – that’s a waste of liquor. But Agent Scully, I assure you – go out today, talk to those people you talked to yesterday. I don’t think you have the whole picture yet.”  
  
“Well, why don’t you paint it for me?” That familiar twinge settled in her stomach, that ache she’d get when she realized Mulder had been baiting her by purposefully withholding case information. She’d come here to break the pattern, but only found it anew in Arthur Dales. At least Dales had the courtesy to touch her a little less. “If there’s something I’m missing, you need to tell me. We’re wasting time here with every moment you hold back important details.”

“If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me. You have to figure it out yourself.” And, in a very Mulder-esque fashion, Dales left her with only a dial tone.

***

She had to leave the island and head back to Sanford to get to a courier, and that meant renting another boat. To her dismay the blond boy remained missing, replaced by that first boy with the earrings.   
  
“Hey there,” she greeted him easily, struggling with the box in her arms. He didn’t offer to help. “It’s good to see you again. Where’s the other boy? The one who rents the kayaks?”  
  
“I rent the kayaks,” he told her.   
  
“There’s not another boy who does it with you? Blond hair?”  
  
“If there is, he hasn’t shown up yet.” He looked her over impatiently, reaching up to fiddle with his industrial piercing. “Are you wanting to cross the river? I don’t know what’s over there.”   
  
She frowned at him. “Are you afraid to go over there today?”  
  
“Hmmph! I’m not afraid of anything,” he hissed. But he was blushing under his furrowed brow, into his deep black collar. “I just don’t know what’s over there, is all. I’ve never been.”   
  


“But we were just over there the other…” she stopped as she watched his face go pale, his fingers lose their grip on a set of keys. They fell into the sand and he hurriedly lurched forward to scoop them up. Halfway back up he stopped to stare at her chest and she caught him quickly, glaring and pulling the box up to conceal herself.   
  
“What is that?” he reached to grab her necklace before she could stop him. He ran his thumb over the golden cross and grimaced. “Of course. You’ve got the hair and the mark but you’re brainwashed.”   
  
“Excuse me?” She pulled away from him abruptly, hugging the box to herself. He shrugged and motioned for her to get in the lone motorboat that graced the island. She went in and sat down, even though her insides matched the choppiness of the waters.

“You got the mark of the devil,” he pointed to his thin upper lip, and she licked her own self-consciously as he followed her and sat behind the wheel. “And you got the hair too. You think you’d know better.”

“Are you saying you’re a Satanist?” she asked. Something clicked in her brain, some connection she wouldn’t be able to reconcile until she got to a library. Satanic ritual abuse, although rarely ever proven, went hand in hand with repression and memory loss. Cult programming, it was called. Brainwashed kids grew into traumatized adults who would remember, often through brutal and extensive therapy, the horrifying realities of what they had suffered: being forced to drink the blood of their slaughtered brothers and sisters, extremely violent sexual assault, monsters, flying witches, drugged out orgies. She looked around herself. A common theme was children being thrown off of boats… “You worship the devil?”   
  
“There’s not really a devil,” he snorted. “I just like what it stands for is all.”   
  
“What does it stand for?”  
  
He went quiet for a moment, but not that dead-eyed quiet she’d seen so much of the past two days. A contemplative quiet.   
  
“Indulgence instead of abstinence,” he began, as if reciting a rehearsed script. He sneered at her. “Vital existence, instead of spiritual pipe dreams.”

They stared at each other across the boat, and Scully fought the urge to play with her necklace. She hugged the box between her knees and went over the details of the McMartin trial in her head. The children were lying. To suggest cult activity as the culprit for this would be just as irresponsible as suggesting aliens. But the boy unnerved her as he stared at her, and for just a moment she pictured the boat capsizing, the two of them boiling in the water like that man on the Côte d’Ivoire. Their flesh would fall apart like pork, their bones would sparkle from the bottom of the river… the young Receptionist, licking gristle from her lips. Scully shuddered and convinced herself it could not be so.

With her phone call to NDIS and the evidence shipped out, she thought of the questions she’d been asking. They weren’t direct enough. She’d been talking to the islanders as if they had her frame of reference. The key was to find somebody, anybody, who could talk to her without spinning her in circles.   
  
Or maybe she could learn how to talk to them.

“There’s a blond boy, your height, with a lip piercing,” she started on their way back, looking him straight in the eyes. Maybe he’d been trying to unnerve her with all of that satanism crap. It was too easy, too stereotypical; she imagined most satanists didn’t actually dress head to toe in all black. “He plays in a band. He’s a guitarist and a singer. Do you know him?”  
  
“Wish I did. I need a guitarist and a singer,” the boy frowned. Scully let herself get a good luck at his eyes. Deep brown and probably brighter than he wanted them to be. And there was nothing to be scared of in him, not really. He seemed to be scared himself.  
  
“He told me, the day I met him, he didn’t think he was supposed to be here. Does that make sense to you?” She leaned forward, imploring to answer her straight. His eyes widened and yes, they were brighter than anything.

“I think I know what you’re talking about. I’m not supposed to be here.” On the shore he hauled her out of the boat, and held her tightly by the shoulders. She went perfectly still. “Come see my band. I’ll tell you more about it.”

***

“I’m calling you early this time around so you don’t ditch me to go on another bender.”

“I’ll ditch you for something else, then.” With her phone pressed to her ear she scrounged around for a notebook and a pen, and started writing down notes while Mulder talked her ear off on the other end of the line.

“– and there are multiple stories of donor recipients suddenly taking on odd personality quirks that they hadn’t had before.   Merve Makin, for instance – a man with impeccable hygiene, and who took his personal appearance very seriously – was reported as coming down with a serious case of nail biting.”  
  
“Is that the X-File, Mulder?” she asked distractedly. “We better examine you, then.”  
  
“I stopped biting my nails,” he sounded vaguely annoyed, at being insulted or being interrupted she didn’t know. “But get this. He was a donor recipient, Scully, and you know what happened to the guy whose heart he inherited?”  
  
“Mmm?”  
  
“He died. Septic shock. From _biting his nails_.” He went on, excitedly: “Our mouths are very dirty, if you didn’t know that, Scully–” I am a goddamn medical doctor, Mulder – “They say a canine’s  mouth is cleaner. But anyway. The case I’m looking at right now, we’ve got another heart transplant recipient, and he died the exact same way his donor did. I’m thinking it’s a pattern. I’m not exactly sure how it’s connected, but–”  
  
“Mulder,” she put her notebook and pen down and pulled her legs onto the bed. She missed this. Had been afraid she’d never be able to really argue with him again, with her beliefs all up in the air the way they were now. But he made it too easy. “Two people dying the same deaths is not that uncommon. What was it? Aneurysm? Heart attack? Anaphylactic shock?

“He shot and killed his wife, and then he killed himself.” He let the moment sit in silence for a minute, making sure he’d achieved her full attention. “Is that an X-File, or what?”

“That’s strange,” she admitted slowly. The heart was not a thinking organ. For all of the lovely metaphors and poetry and artwork that existed the heart did not ever tell us what to feel, nevertheless what to do. She’d put her initials in the middle a hundred thousand times, with an arrow poking through. The initials of the other person changed over time but still it was just a muscle, and she considered herself well versed on the matters of the heart. It contracted, it dilated, it did not split in two. “Maybe he knew about the murder suicide and wanted to copy it. I’ll concede there are unanswered questions.”  
  
“Glad to see we agree on something,” he said. She could hear the smile in his tone. “When you get back to D.C. we’re immediately hopping on the first flight out to Lawton, Oklahoma so you can get in on that autopsy. I thought about just having the body shipped down to Florida but–” Scully felt her blood seize.

“How on earth did you know I was in Florida?” His answering silence pissed her off even more. “Mulder?”  
  
“You thought Skinner wouldn’t tell me?” He said it like he couldn’t believe she was that stupid.

“Not when I explicitly told him this was a very private matter and that I preferred he keep the knowledge to himself, especially as I offered it as a completely unnecessary professional courtesy, but that doesn’t matter, Mulder, the issue is that I want you to respect me enough to realize perhaps I hadn’t told anyone for a reason – “  
  
“I’m your partner, and you hadn’t even told your mother. What was I supposed to do – “  
  
“Understand that I don’t need to tell you my whereabouts twenty-four seven and respect me enough as an agent – as a _person_ – to give me privacy when I ask for it–”   
  
“You didn’t ask for privacy. You didn’t ask for anything. You just ran off, which is very typical of you, Scully, I’m not sure why I didn’t expect it–”  
  
“What is the hell is that supposed to mean?”  
  
“You ran off. You got scared and you ran off. Normally you just do it in your mind, but this time, Scully, you decided to go to the other end of the east coast, which is admittedly dramatic for you, but maybe you just needed to get back to the water.”   
  
“ _I_ run off?” She felt as if she were going crazy. This was a conversation she’d pictured in her head a million times, but never considered it could actually happen. Or that she’d be on this end of it. “Out of all the ridiculous things I have heard you say over our years together that tops it, Mulder. You have been running since the day we’ve met.”  
  
“I’m not running anymore, Scully,” he said roughly. They’d both been shouting. The things being said – unheard of, in their partnership. She didn’t understand what was happening. They pushed and pushed and pushed each other in opposite directions and felt wounded when the other actually began to stray. But they never actually said anything about it. “I need you to understand this. I’m completely respecting your privacy. If I wanted to find you, actually find you, so that I could track you down and show up your hotel room, I could.”

“Mulder,” she hissed, almost paralyzed by anger at the thought. “Why? So you could read my damn mind again? Don’t you have enough material to psychoanalyze and tear apart until the day I die?”  
  
“No, I mean, yes, I mean damn it, Scully! Yes I want to fucking – you don’t understand what it’s like, I wish you did, but that’s not–”  
  
She hung up on him, and vowed that if he showed up and knocked on her door she’d shoot him down.

***

In her notebook she recorded what she could remember of the conversations she’d had with people around the town. Already in a bad mood the list made her feel worse, purely as an investigator. There was so little to go on, and anyone she had a conversation with almost shut her off immediately. Quiet, stolid men who matched Marcus Haze’s profile ignored her soundly in their corner of the little diner. They day they all ate microwaved chicken nuggets and a little cup of yogurt that looked like it sprung right out of the seventies.

And then, outside the diner, well – reception to her was even frostier. She’d begun to realize that this was a functioning town only in the most bare bones of ways, and possibly not even that – besides the medical center, the bar, the general store, the diner, and the kayak rental station, and the little houses on the shoreline, there weren’t many places for people to… be. A small library sat on the very edge of town, but had almost no books to speak of. She wondered how anyone was getting power. The lines were there, the systems were set up, but who was controlling it all?

And what did people do for fun? They mostly roamed around, it seemed. What she did know for certain, the only comforting surety she’d been thusly afforded, was that everyone had their own distinct personality. The boy on the boat assured her of this, and suddenly she understood what Dales knew she was missing.   
  
The boy hadn’t remembered her, not in the slightest, despite having met her the other day. He hadn’t even remembered being on the other side of the river.

These people weren’t just suffering from long-term memory loss. It appeared as if their capacity for short-term memory was also significantly altered. This wasn’t a huge mystery in itself – a knock in the head, a good knock in the head, would change any and every kind of memory you’d have for the rest of your life. These could be people with severe brain damage. But as time went on, Scully realized…  
  
Perhaps… they might not be.

At the medical center again, she sucked it up and forced her way back inside. The receptionist smiled prettily at her and asked, are you a doctor. She told her yes, and shouldered her way back to the examination room.  
  
This time the old woman was the Doctor, and her patient was the masked man from the day before. No I.V. this time.  
  
“Just a routine checkup,” they both told her. And she turned around and left.  
  
***

It was while munching angrily on her little cup of yogurt she’d whisked away from the diner that she noticed it, and again that inadequacy returned. It was really quite obvious. It was the only vehicle she’d seen.  
  
A supply truck. The logo on the back read _Odde & Bradley_. She looked down at her cup of yogurt. Odde & Bradley.  
  
At the bar, she ran into the Alcoholic. She was tending. Upon Scully’s questioning, she raised her eyebrow and told her, “I’m the barkeeper. That’s my license on the wall.”   
  
The license actually bore no specific name, and Scully ignored her for the time being. She’d come back to her later. She asked for a bottle, just for herself, and the Alcoholic didn’t know what to charge her. Scully handed her a five. People started pouring in for the live entertainment, and she would join them just as soon as she figured out what the hell it was she’d stumbled upon.  
  
On the bottle: Odde & Bradley.

The bottles in the motel office: Odde & Bradley.  
  
She went to the general store, packed with odd, outdated foods in boxes that were yellowing and decorated with cartoon characters she must’ve been too young to remember. The selection was lacking, reflecting a palette so unrefined it could be considered childlike. This general store served the needs of the whole town. Snack foods filled every shelf to be found, especially sweets. Canned soups and frozen meals, not a single fresh thing to be found. How were these people alive?  
  
And then she saw, on every single package. Odde & Bradley.   
  
She’d never heard of Odde & Bradley before in her life.


	5. Chapter 5

There were moments in certain cases Scully prayed to God for a body to sink her scalpel into. Bodies she could make sense of. Real live people, their motivations, what made them do what they did day in and day out and what made them hide a body, or conjure a spirit entity, or shapeshift into one – that was Mulder’s gig, and he did it well. Scully understood it and applied her own skills when duty called. She did not particularly enjoy it. **  
**

But she could pull a thread and watch a thing unravel. Here she was presented with several threads, and she had an ominous feeling that more would come.

It had been like this in Africa, uncovering mystery after mystery after mystery and never quite feeling like she had the whole picture. Stories of Noah’s wife and children straying from their beliefs, getting swept up in the flood, only to cut off suddenly, segue into what she had been taught and what she repeated as a child. A happy family, everyone believed: there’d been no reason to stray.

Her phone buzzed in her travel backpack, twice, three times, and she shut it off, tucked her notebook away and a few boxes of Mug-O-Lunch and hard candy along with it.  


The music spilled out of the bar and into the balmy air and made it cooler, like a rush of wind. Inside the bar it was just stifling. Bodies writhed and laughter rang clear as if everyone were under the impression the cacophony of too-much symbol and two-chord strumming exacted in the greatest rock band known to existence. Scully shuddered. It was damn near impossible to listen to. 

But the Drummer, the boy with the piercings, eyed her behind his kit with a sense of recognition. The Alcoholic only looked bored to see her, slid over a martini glass filled with red wine and forgot to wait for her payment. The Manager was throwing up in the bathroom, the Waitress was letting her hair down and biting her lip. Almost the exact scene she’d arrived to the other night, only the details were fogged up a little bit like an actor messing up his lines. The Receptionist batted sooty eyelashes at the Guitarist, and the Drummer didn’t seem to care.  
  
She stayed until the music stopped this time and watched everyone mill around each other. She caught snippets of conversation that alerted her to the truth – it was all small talk, intense, touchy-feely small talk, the stuff Mulder’s greatest nightmares were made of. What are you doing these days, going to this bar I guess, did you know who you were this morning, I think I found out. I found this jacket on my bed when I woke up. I’m pretty sure I’m an electrician. I’m glad to have met you. You too.  
  
She’d meant to corner the Drummer like he’d asked, thrumming with bemused energy at what he might reveal to her. Before she could find him and get him alone, the crowd began to thin as it emptied out of the bar. She followed them.

It was a camaraderie she had yet to be exposed to, there on the river. For once everyone seemed to know everyone else. They cheered, they held hands, they wrapped arms around shoulders around waists around friends. They did not talk to each other about anything specific. They walked, and danced, and led her straight to the riverbank that garnered so little light from the moon. 

And then they stepped in. 

Their voices died as they went under and came back up, hair slick and eyes tightly closed. For a moment they moved their arms, tried to grab purchase in the water. There was none to be had. So then they swam, really swam: they did not just float or splash or try to touch the ground. They did laps around each other. They dove down and glided pin-straight like grumpy alligator gar.  
  
One by one, they followed each other out of the water in a bizarre recreation of _March of Progress_ , shimmering sea creature to Homo sapien in under five minutes. They ignored each other, squeezed the water out of their shirts and pants and skirts and dresses, poured it out of their shoes, shook it out of their hair, licked their lips as droplets fell from temple to brow to nose to mouth. And then they left her there, stranded on the poorly lit shoreline, ambling back to houses and trailers and one little hut, situated on the far right. Some went straight home. They sought out a building and stumbled into it, shutting the door behind them like they’d lived there all their lives.  


But others struggled. They all held keys in the palms of their hands, like she had the night she first arrived. The Hotel Manager had not been able to give her a room number. She’d had to unlock every single door until she came to one that opened, like a more-annoyed Alice, so done with all the wonder and amazement life had to offer and just in need of a hot bath.  
  
They repeat her actions, crossing each other’s path as they switched off from house to house. One person would find the right one, step inside, and the choice would be narrowed down for the rest of them. They’d start their journey anew, until the lock gave and they found their home for the night. This continued until Scully was truly alone, looking over the still waters, thinking grimly about kayak rentals and manatees and the plausibility of catching forgetfulness. 

***  
  
The routine started up again the next morning. She went to see the Manager about a lack of hot water in her bathroom, but he was nowhere to be found. Later that day she saw him shearing palm bark from overgrown trees and it occurred to her he might not always be the Manager. No one was always just one thing, but it was as if he’d never been a motel manager at all. 

Thoughts filled her head throughout the day which she brushed off as soon as they came to her, lest she panic and make it worse. Arthur Dales was meeting her in Sanford to help her send out samples of water; she could not trust anyone at the Bureau with this. If word got back to the C.D.C. or anyone in the state of Florida that there was evidence of a mass contamination, and by the way, it was in the water? Things would go to hell with fire and brimstone. No, she’d come to agree with Dales. No one could know about this. Not until she knew what was going on. 

If it was in the water she could be infected. She’d never even gotten her hair wet, but she had dragged her fingers through the water, squeezed it out of her shoes when her kayak almost tipped. Burial mounds dotted the bank and poked up under low tide; she’d touched the bleachy-white shells and refused to take any. Sanctity of life and all of that.  
  
If it was in the food, there’d be no saving her. She ate at the diner in the morning, soggy oatmeal with way too much brown sugar. She had guzzled her wine the night before. Yes, if it was in the food she was a goner. She’d just have to accept this and let Arthur Dales know what she had found so he may continue where she left off, while she worked quickly to ward off the oncoming… whatever it was. The oncoming hell.  
  
This had to be the worst circle of hell. 

The Receptionist blinked her lovely eyes at her and asked if she were a nurse. That was new. Scully hadn’t seen one nurse since she arrived, but before she could even begin to wrap her head around the question the Alcoholic stumbled in behind her with blue scrubs and a stethoscope and dark red lipstick. The Old Lady thumbed through a wrinkled pamphlet in the waiting room – a medical brochure from the little city just across the river. Somehow it floated over or got transferred by a boat.  
  
On the back it listed health services provided by a low-income clinic. Routine checkups. I.V. medication as necessary. Her head spun. The Old Woman looked up at her and asked if she was in for a physical as well. The pamphlet advertised physicals.  
  
Scully wouldn’t think about it. She couldn’t. She did, in between checking in with residents she’d begun to recognize only by their archetypal behaviors and spacey affect. If she were to wake up every morning and not know who she was, what would she do with herself? If no one were there to set her straight and tell her who she’d been.  
  
She’d have to reconstruct. She was beginning to understand. The islanders with their keys, opening up each door until something gave.  
  
That was what they did, day in and day out.  
  
The Alcoholic woke up hungover each morning, a bottle of wine at her bed. One day she woke up with a set of keys that opened the bar. The Waitress had her uniform, the Receptionist her clipboard. Normally the Manager slept in his office and would wake up and figure he should stay put and do what people asked of him. The Drummer carried collapsible kayak stands from the house he left to the shore and set them up under her watchful eye.  
  
And muscle memory, the physicality of things. The plumbers and the electricians, one disappearing into her room to fix the water. He couldn’t tell her his name but could reach into a water heater, gut the insides and put it all back together. The musicians with their lack of skill but apparent comfort with their instruments. The Doctor, the Old Woman, reaching into each other with needles and feeling for heartbeats and knocking knees with plastic hammers.  
  
What would she be. What would she do. Would she still be a doctor, innately knowing where to put her hands on a living being to make them well again? The amount of recertification and education she’d put up with begged to differ. Would she be a cop, comforting in the distinctly memorable feeling of her fingers pinching a trigger? No cops were here. Did they even understand what it meant to have authority? Was there a need for it? Where was the boy?  
  
Old men, thickly built with grizzled faces, did push ups between clusters of trees and in the streets. Most of them were black, the older ones, with rigid posture and hardset gazes. They ignored her every time she tried to get their attention.  
  
When the thoughts threatened to choke her out with fright she reached immediately for her cell phone. She even pressed dial, once, but convinced herself to hang up on first ring. She called Arthur Dales instead, packed away her stolen non-perishables, and headed briskly to the dock.  
  
The Drummer was there. He did not recognize her. He rolled her eyes at her attempts to greet him and ushered her into the boat. She asked him again about the other boy, the one who wasn’t supposed to be there, and he promised to meet her after his show if she wanted to come see his band. 

***

“I’ll be damned,” Dales told her, and the look of wonder on his face made her want to wring his neck. Men like he and Mulder always found something to wonder at, never seemed to offer it the full gravity it deserved. They reacted to life like she did to death with her microscope and little tape recorder, and today she could not put up with it.  
  
“I need the contents of this to be analyzed as soon as possible,” she demanded, handing him a vial across the table. Ever the gentleman he took her to Denny’s – he hadn’t even complained she was too young for the senior special. He clasped the vial in his hands and shook it, ignoring her withering glare. “Time is of the essence. If there is something in that water we will _both_ be affected.”  
  
“I’ll get right on it,” he nodded to her and slid it in a briefcase he’d brought along with him. She sighed and chewed miserably on a piece of pineapple before reaching behind her to pull out a canned good.  
  
“Odde and Bradley,” she stated, plopping it in front of him. Chicken noodle soup, a childhood favorite. “Have you ever heard of it?”  
  
He plucked it from between them and ran his fingers over the label with interest. “I don’t believe I have. That sounds like it’d be a joint law practice.”  
  
“I’m guessing it’s a food manufacturer, and not a major one,” she said. “It’s everything. It’s all they eat. Everything they put into their bodies comes from a box or a can and there are no other brands to be found. I’m amazed they’re still alive if they’ve been there any more than three years. The sodium content in those products is enough lift all of the rocks in that river.”  
  
“This box of pasta has those animated Beatles on it,” he smiled. It didn’t fully lift up at the corners, and his eyes didn’t follow. “My son loved that show. I haven’t seen anything like this in over thirty years.”  
  
“I didn’t know you had a son, Mr. Dales.”  
  
“Yes, Arthur Dales, the fourth. Possibly the ninth. My boy.” He dumped the can in his briefcase and reached a shaky hand out to grip his glass of orange juice. “Died in Vietnam. The body was never found.”  
  
Blood rushed to her face, in embarrassment and sympathy. “I’m so sorry.”  
  
“It’s been a long, long time, Agent Scully.” He reached out and patted her hand curling around a mug. His own continued to tremble, and she couldn’t decide whether it was age, a nerve disorder or the physical reaction to an aching memory. Then he was pulling back, straightening in his seat and tugging his luggage into his lap. “Well, I ought to be heading back then. It’s been too damn long since I’ve had a drink. I’ll get this stuff tested and  give you a call as soon as I get some results – if I get on my knees I think I still have someone at the station who will throw me a bone.” Sliding out of the booth, he helped her up and looked at her seriously. “If there’s anything messy, anything at all, we’ll get you out of there. However, I am extremely certain these are not our leads.”  
  
He did not say anymore about the subject, except to tell her he would look into Odde  & Bradley himself. Any internet connection she would find here might not be secure. Then he left her back by the docks to meet the Drummer, who was waiting for her impatiently.  
  
While looking at him and the piercing on his brow, a boy who looked so much like Charlie, she convinced herself to put aside her fear of the situation and her anger at Dales (and really, at Mulder), for getting her into this mess without giving her the facts. Anger at herself, for needing the facts so desperately. Anger that she dove into this without them. Well, she frowned. If I lose my mind, I will no longer have to worry about Mulder trying to read it. And that was the last thought she let herself have on the subject. There were people who needed her help.  


***

Inevitably it became the waiting game it’d always been for her. She needed the results. She needed to finally talk to that Drummer and find out what he knew about the blond and perhaps, if she saw a need for it, look into cult activity in the area. Investigate anything suspicious. Later that night she wanted to try to get into somebody’s house and see how these people lived in the dark, away from the responsibilities they gave themselves and in the middle of the puzzle they pieced together at the start of each day.  
  
But mostly she wanted those results. Her blood felt heavy in her limbs. Water went down like acid in the sensitive flesh of her throat. She wasn’t scared, she wouldn’t let herself be. But she was cautious. She stood under the spray of her shower (hot, finally) and thanked God for city water.  
  
She called her mother and promised her photos of her lovely kayaking ventures and a monstrous alligator she’d seen gliding among the reeds. She made a joke just to make Maggie Scully a little uncomfortable, the way a mother’s child never tires of doing: I’m using this time to turn a lot of water into wine, mom. That earned her a “Be careful, sweetie, don’t overdo it.” And that just made her feel terribly guilty.  
  
Mulder called again, and this time she picked up. She was grateful that he moved right on past their argument of yesterday and went straight into the details of a case he was brought in to consult on. She’d have to tell him she wasn’t up for taping tonight because she was due back at the bar, and her voice would be strong enough that he’d know she wasn’t deflecting. Her problems with him and his dream and what they’d gone through seemed less real here, and she found herself forgetting its significance day by day.

“They’re telling me it’s not an X-File, but I can’t see any other explanation. Her entire stomach cavity was filled with live birds and no one can figure out how they’d got there. No incisions or indication of surgery in that area, no evidence of postmortem predation. Unless they find some feathers in her mouth I’m not sure we can rely on a simple profile to get us anywhere.”  
  
“Your profiling is never simple,” she told him seriously, imagining the workings of a shy smile on his face. “But why not? You don’t think it’s human?”  
  
“I’m not sure what it is, Scully, but she won’t be coughing it up anytime soon. Did I tell you the birds were _alive_?”  
  
“That’s impossible. The gastric fluids would dissolve them entirely.”  
  
“You’d be right, except for that there _were no_ gastric fluids. Or any other liquid in her body except for blood. I can’t believe they’re telling me this isn’t an X-File. Scully, I need to ask you a question.”  
  
“Hmm?” Her body was relaxed, her head propped up against a pillow. She felt more normal than she had in months, more stable, if only for a moment. Have him courier a few autopsy photos over to the Orlando office. That wouldn’t be suspicious. It was supposed to be magical this time of year…

“Whose DNA are you testing at the rapid analysis lab?”


	6. Chapter 6

She did not lie to him. She was ashamed to admit she considered it. The fear of forgetting Mulder and never seeing him again hit her so hard so suddenly her voice shook when she doled out the details – very carefully, very slowly – over the phone. She told him about Arthur Dales. About looking into a case dealing with mass amnesia and peculiar brain abnormalities. **  
**

She did not, however, give him all the details. Some things he just didn’t need to know: her physical location, the oppressive totality of her involvement, the waves of nausea every time a bout of simple forgetfulness hit her, like how she accidentally locked herself out of her room that morning, or, perhaps even more frightfully, that she had to actually look at her badge to recite the number when calling the lab to inquire about her request.

It was the closest to begging she’d ever heard from Mulder. He told her he couldn’t hear things anymore. Everything was quiet and everyone was safe. He stayed at his desk, like she asked, he played nice with the bureaucrats, like she asked, he wouldn’t push her anymore, about the recording or the craft or anything else, like she asked. He could just read her field notes and paint the general picture and continue the search from there or they could do it together when she felt better. Scully, I always drop it when you tell me to. Don’t I? He didn’t mention her abduction or her cancer or her dead child, but the tragedy was evident in his voice. Don’t I? Don’t I? Come back. Let me join you. You don’t have backup. Do you? Have backup? Are you doing this through the field office? Can you send me your notes? Maybe I can do something here. Your results were inconclusive. They ran them several times like you asked. What are you doing out there Scully?  
  
By the end of that conversation she felt bruised and tender on the inside, like certain spots were prodded to the point of overstimulation. Guilt made it hard for her to breathe. Mulder understood something about her sudden departure that she had yet to firmly grasp – that it wasn’t just a vacation from the work, or even from him. She’d left herself behind in D.C. as well. Her rationality. Her logic. Here she was in an unknown city, surrounded by nothing anyone had ever known, walking blindly into a situation she understood to be quite dangerous and unrecognizable from the very beginning. Dales had not been subtle in his description of the fear and uncertainty this place evoked in hom.  
  
And yet she still dove in, like the town folks into the river. To prove to herself that she could.  
  
That she had not been destroyed in discovering the secrets of the universe. That she would not deflect and lose her sense of self in being tasked with explaining the inexplicable once again. That everything she knew in life and held sacred – like science, religion, lyrics to The Beatles’ hit “Yesterday,” and yes, of course, her feelings for him – had not been delivered to the world from space more than a million years ago like a selection of trash magazines in a hospital waiting room.  
  
That this discovery had not made her scared, docile in her pristine bleach white tower. That the cross on her neck was not someone else’s lie she told herself. That she would not be rendered useless to her work, to Mulder’s work – and thereby useless to Mulder.

He had forgotten her once before for much less, had effectively killed her off in a dream.

She pulled out the big guns to stop him from getting more out of her.

“I’m fine, Mulder.” At his snort of disgust, she amended: “I promise that I’m okay. I needed this time away from the office. It’s doing me a lot of good.”  
  
For some reason it placated him. He let it go, like he promised he would. They talked about other things – the pizza he owed her since he upended the last one on the coffee table in his rage. Skinner’s new exceptionally busty girlfriend who made a cryptozoological appearance in the cafeteria after both Mulder and Scully had determined he was lying about seeing anyone. The new Piers Anthony novel he had slipped into her cubby for when she returned – with margin notes and post-its added for her benefit. He wouldn’t let her argue. She had forced him to read the entirety of Princess Diana’s authorized biography and _he_ didn’t argue. He was so full of shit. He loved that book. He wouldn’t stop talking about it for days. Wouldn’t stop trying to convince her the MI6 played a huge role in her death. But whatever, Mulder.  
  
When he finally hung up, the sun was dipping down into the river, her guilt was burying itself deep, and her disappointment at not being able to identify three seemingly missing people weighed heavily upon her.  
  
***

She entered the bar early, the need for a drink clawing restlessly at her bones. That red wine was her only option felt like a crime; how she yearned for something much stronger, something to erase the nauseating amount of self-reflection she’d been forced to do that day.

  
Something to help her forget.  
  
No one sat at the bar but the Alcoholic, dressed up in her newly acquired nursing gear and resting her head heavily in her hands.  
  
“Hard day?” Scully asked, slipping onto the stool right beside her. She motioned to the bartender, the Asian man again, to pour her a glass of wine. He shrugged and passed her a mug of red.  
  
The Alcoholic groaned, tangling her fingers in her wild black curls. Scully fixated on her pursing lips when she finally looked up.  
  
“I don’t know anything about being a nurse,” she sighed, knocking down her shot of wine with urgency. Her lipstick was still perfect when she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “I found this stuff beside my bed this morning and put it on.”

“How do you even know what a nurse is?” Scully asked, perturbed. She took a healthy swig of her own wine and scrunched up her nose. God, this wine was terrible, just like the stuff her sister would sneak into the base. “How do you know what a nurse is and not understand you couldn’t possibly be one?”

“No one knows who they are,” the woman answered. She sounded like a machine shutting off. Goddamnit, why was everyone so cryptic here, especially this woman in particular? Did she mean that as the overarching theme of what it meant to be human, or was she simply referring to the way she lived her own life, they way everybody lived their lives in this god awful place? Scully asked her to clarify. The Alcoholic just shrugged.  
  
Scully asked for more wine in her mug and did not bother paying. She was not sure these people even understood the concept of money.  
  
Around the time Scully began to feel light-headed, the curly-haired woman eyed her curiously. Her eyes were brown and wide and made Scully feel uncomfortably understood. Thin small fingers tapped insistently at her thigh. “What do you do? What brings you here?”

If the realization that no one had asked her about herself in an embarrassing amount of time came over Scully at just that moment, it did not reflect on her face. And truly no one did ask. Most people just assumed. If she wanted to cry about this she didn’t. If she wanted bottle service she didn’t ask for it. Instead she answered the woman’s questions as if the woman would remember her in the morning.  
  
“I’m a medical doctor and yes, I did know that when I woke up this morning.” She waved dismissively when they other woman widened her eyes. “I’m here because I don’t know who I am, either.”  
  
Another mug of wine; a small crowd had begun to hang around, ordering drinks and striking up with perfect strangers who had been best friends just the day before. The band was not set to play for yet another hour.  
  
Scully could form a habit of losing herself in dark-eyed strangers – might be doing so in another life. And she was always so much more languid in her drunkenness. The Alcoholic kneaded her thighs while Scully stared starkly at the bottles lined on the wall.  
  
“I don’t understand what’s happened to you all. There is absolutely no medical precedence for anything that is going on here. It honestly reads like bad science fiction and I feel like I’ve just stumbled on this generation’s version of pod people.” Her companion tutted sympathetically and moved her clever fingers to work at the taught muscles in Scully’s shoulders. “The brain just doesn’t work the way your existence seems to suggest. You cannot shut off the entirety of a person’s understanding of themselves and keep the rest of their memory in tact.” She winced when the Alcoholic dug into a tender spot, quite mercilessly, and reached around to halt her movements. “You probably aren’t a massage therapist, either.”  
  
Scully looked at the woman oddly as she shrugged and darted to gulp down another shot of wine. Slightly drunk she tried to consider what it was people most often wanted to forget.  
  
No one wanted to forget the alphabet, or how to speak a language, or the lyrics to their favorite song. Nor did they want to forget the skills they’ve honed fine-toothed and self-enriching, how to steer a boat or microwave a meal or do a thousand push-ups. No, it was everything else they wanted to forget, their past, the people they’ve hurt, the hurts they’ve faced, the parts of them that hurt other people and felt hurt.  


Despite the heat of the bar and the crowd and the liquor pulling blood to her face and chest, Scully felt ice cold. The Alcoholic slammed down another shot. If there was ever a person who wanted to forget something… wanted. If there was ever a person who wanted to forget something.  
  
Marcus Haze and his miserable, miserable existence. Three goth boys with bad hair and sad eyes. Old women, young women, men with no arms or two arms and no teeth. The drink. Always the drink. Her, with her limp cross and her empty life and the abduction of everything she understood.  
  
The crowd filled in around her. The boys began to play. The Receptionist came up to the Alcoholic and kissed her square on the mouth and the Alcoholic looked at Scully with a small amount of regret. The Waitress leaned against the bar and reapplied her lipstick. The black man with one arm tilted his head back and smiled. The bartender looked weary. He looked young. He looked old. He looked like nothing at all.  
  
One woman’s hell, it seemed, constituted the heaven of  several others. With sobering certainty Scully came to the realization that it was possible the entire situation was very voluntary.

***

It was with a focused blindness she followed the drenched boys back to their little house, the one furthest from the shore. They leaked river water on the paveway, on their doorstep and on the hardwood floors. They did not bother to get dry, nor did they attempt conversation.

The house itself was exactly what Scully expected; there was no personal flair, no real proof the boys lived there or did anything more than sleep. Their clothes were in the closet, black and black and maybe blacker, and drumsticks littered the floor of the pierced boy’s bedroom. He collapsed his kayak stand and stored it in the hall.

It all reminded her of what a place looked like on the base before a family moved in and destroyed it forever. Bare. The furniture was plainer than plain, made of pine and PVC and prison ward plastic. It made her feel nostalgic as if she were about to crawl in bed and await her sister to sneak in through the window and tell her what it was like to kiss boys.  
  
And predictability the sparse decor was not of this time. The couch was crocheted, the wallpaper was brown and the carpet was a thick, unsettling orange that reminded her less of traffic cones and more of rotted pumpkins. She dragged her fingers through dirt and dust and came back gray fingers. She felt as if  she was stroking time itself.

The Drummer, still wet with river water and shaking head to toe in the cold air, popped his head out of his bedroom and tossed her a beige journal. “Read that.”  
  
And so she did.  
  
Pages and pages and pages of song lyrics, all in the same hand-writing until the last three or four. Pentagrams were drawn in the margins and Hot Stuff the Little Devil and guns and vampire teeth and nude women writhing on piles of rocks. The lyrics were youthful and hateful but sometimes not that way; then there were words about pretty long hair and the scent of raspberries and breaking into playgrounds in the dead of night.

The very last lyrics almost stood out to her the least. They seemed almost normal. No one died in it, no one had sex in it – it just seemed… wistful, shy, like a teenager who didn’t know where they belonged. Words about being picked last and being surrounded by empty seats and being too stupid and unworthy to just approach the girl and say hi. But at the end of it…  
  
I don’t think I’m supposed to be here.  
  
I don’t think I’m supposed to be here.  
  
I don’t think I’m supposed to be here.  
  
My father always said you gotta fix yourself.  
  
Fix yourself.  
  
And there’s only one way to do it.  
  
I don’t think I’m supposed to be here.  
  
I don’t think I’m supposed to be here.  
  
I don’t think I’m supposed to be here.  
  
Scully slipped the journal shut and rested the weight of her palm on top of it, willing the words to stay inside and not slip away from her. They were the words of the boy. There were two distinct handwriting styles inside the book and she knew one of them had to be the Drummer’s. But those lyrics were all from the boy who disappeared from disappearance, the one who told her that first day something was deeply wrong with the way he was living his life.  
  
I don’t think I’m supposed to be here.  
  
It implied the boy understood that there was here, and that there were other places, too. It implied the boy had a father who taught him things, things he remembered enough to jot down. Did he go back to his father? Did he remember, suddenly, the things he had forgotten and somehow find his way back? The day she met him he was as out of sorts as the rest of the people on this river.  But if he were able to escape and rejoin all the people who knew too much, that meant everyone here stood a chance as well. Scully wasn’t sure they were interested in that.  
  
It meant that she had a chance, if any of her suspicions were proven correct, if she were to fall subject to their fate.  
  
She didn’t ask the Drummer if she could keep the journal. She just took it. The band didn’t even have a singer. And on her way out she looked through their books and belongings and found a copy of LaVey’s _The Satanic Bible_. Thumbing through it she came face to face with the words the Drummer had scared her so badly with the other day – indulgence before abstinence, all the stuff about spiritual pipe dreams and her mole being the mark of the devil and her hair color painting her as kin. If he were to wake up and put his clothes on in the morning to reconstruct his sense of self he’d pick up the drumsticks and dress up in all black and stumble across this bible, read it word for word and take it as his own tried and true belief system. He’d take his kayak stand to the dock and wait for minutes or hours to see if someone was bored enough to try and kill time in the water. Scully never saw another soul out there when she went, though she had looked backwards and forwards and to the side, wondering if she was crazy to want to be in that water without being drenched in it, without being pulled under like a siren’s fresh kill.

In the mornings Scully woke up and put her clothes on and stumbled around trying to remember what it was she did for a living. She’d play with her cross and worry about the amount of time it’d been since she last called her mother and resolve to never second-guess her life choices though she was probably long overdue.

But during the day she recognized the world around her. Despite Mulder’s attempts to flip hers on its axis, there’d always be a bit of familiarity there in his warm hands on her back or the heat of his breath on her ear. She would know him when she saw him and she’d know herself, too, every single time he saw her. And she would know her mother and her times tables and the placement of her bones and how hard she worked to be where she was on any particular day. Some things she just knew, some things just were. She was nothing like these people, nothing like them at all, and something was very wrong with them that her expertise could not diagnose.  
  
But the boy got away.   
  
She had to find the boy.  
  
The next day she approached the Drummer and once again he helped her cross the river. That morning he only had his satanic bible to read and nothing else. He quoted it the whole ride over, shaking his head at the gold between her breasts and the red of her hair.  
  
Scully asked him if he was supposed to be here.  
  
He told her he didn’t know what the hell she was talking about.


End file.
